As Jeanne looked at the two individuals before her, a myriad of thoughts swirled through her mind, yet she found herself at a loss for how to articulate the peculiar sensation residing in her heart.
In truth, there was no need for Cecilia to explain what brought them here. Jeanne easily deduced the reason behind their venture into such a volatile region; they were undoubtedly here to seek out the child's father.
Yet, to cross paths in such a coincidental manner out here in the wilds was a turn of events that transcended even Jeanne's imagination. For a fleeting second, she even harbored a passing suspicion that some hidden hand was orchestrating this reunion behind the scenes, but try as she might, she couldn't formulate a single rational explanation to support the theory.
"Hello, Ms. Feoria. It appears your physical health has recovered quite a bit." Jeanne directed her gaze toward Cecilia's mother, who was currently staring back at her, finding the Saintess's sudden manifestation in this godforsaken place to be entirely surreal.
When Feoria beheld Jeanne, her surprise was heavily laced with a layer of rigid constraint. After all, the person sitting opposite her was the revered Saintess of Laterano—even if her current appearance and demeanor felt distinctly unusual.
Had it not been for Cecilia proactively initiating the greeting, Feoria would have hardly dared to believe that this somewhat enigmatic woman was the very same Saintess she had previously encountered. The current Jeanne felt like an entirely different person compared to before!
"Greetings, Your Holiness. I never anticipated running into you in a place like this. May I inquire if your deployment to Kazdel is related to some official ecclesiastical business?"
Once Feoria collected her wits, she hastily offered her respects. Though it hadn't been very long since they last met, her physical constitution had indeed improved significantly; even the resonance of her voice carried a noticeably healthier depth than before.
And indeed, that was the reality of the situation. Feoria's historical frailty had primarily been driven by the agonizing, near-constant psychological strain of sheltering Cecilia. Given Laterano's baseline standard of living, her health would never have deteriorated to such an extreme under normal social parameters.
Now, however, Cecilia's unique circumstances had been formally recognized by Laterano. Furthermore, she had secured an absolute guarantee from the Pope himself that the child would be shielded from any existential peril, allowing the heavy burden on her heart to finally ease.
Relieved of the grueling labor of concealing Cecilia's identity, and with her standard of living experiencing a noticeable upgrade, Feoria felt her overall vitality and mental acuity sharpen to a degree she hadn't experienced in years.
"Please, do not address me as the Saintess out here. You may simply call me by my name," Jeanne requested with casual detachment as she settled into the carriage. At that point, the mother and daughter finally took notice of Fafnir, who was standing quietly beside Jeanne without uttering a single word.
This child... bears a striking physical resemblance to Jeanne! Feoria scrutinized the young dragon before glancing back at Jeanne, intuitively feeling that if she were to assume Jeanne was the mother, there was still some subtle detail that didn't align logically.
"I crossed paths with this child a short while ago. Noticing that our facial features shared a strong similarity, I decided to keep her by my side. But more importantly, do you intend to take Cecilia to meet her father?"
Sensing Feoria's curiosity regarding Fafnir, Jeanne casually manufactured a plausible cover story to smooth over the anomaly. Feoria found nothing suspicious about the explanation, merely marveling inwardly at the sheer magnitude of the coincidence.
Of course, this visual alignment was primarily because Fafnir had used Talulah's biological matrix as her foundational blueprint; to an outside observer, she merely shared a fleeting, fractional resemblance to Jeanne. For two entirely unrelated individuals to possess that minor threshold of facial similarity was by no means a mathematical impossibility in this vast land.
"Yes! Mama said that this time, she is taking me to find Papa!" Before Feoria could even formulate a reply, Cecilia enthusiastically hijacked the conversation from the side, her radiant expression making it abundantly clear that she was thoroughly ecstatic.
Feoria offered a gentle nod of confirmation. To her mind, there was absolutely nothing worth concealing from Jeanne; after all, if the Saintess truly desired to unearth such intelligence, she possessed the systemic means to secure the data regardless of the barriers.
"Are the two of you traveling entirely unescorted? Are you truly not worried about encountering hostile variables along the highway?" Jeanne's brow furrowed slightly as she voiced her lingering anxieties.
Even she was acutely aware that venturing into Kazdel under the current geopolitical climate was an incredibly hazardous endeavor. Jeanne found it difficult to believe that Feoria could possess a heart so reckless as to escort a fragile child into this war-torn territory without a robust contingency plan.
"We are not entirely isolated. Our original blueprint was to arrange a brief meeting along the border fringes of Laterano. However, due to recent systemic upheavals, the border patrols have tightened their security parameters significantly, leaving us with no choice but to adjust our route."
A trace of embarrassment colored Feoria's features. In all honesty, she had desperately wished to avoid stepping foot into Kazdel. As a survivor who had personally endured a brutal assault in her past, how could she possibly remain ignorant of the lethal operational index of this nation?
Yet, driven by a series of overriding external variables, she had ultimately solidified her resolve to escort her child deep into this hazardous territory.
While the adults were engrossed in their dialogue, the sidelined Cecilia redirected her curiosity toward Fafnir. She internalised the assumption that this younger sister had likely gotten separated from her family and been rescued by Jeanne, much like her own past circumstances.
Fafnir's focus, however, was fundamentally detached from Cecilia. She remained perfectly stationary beside Jeanne, completely mute, her predatory eyes locked onto Jeanne's form without a single micro-expression flitting across her face.
Observing this hyper-fixated, unresponsive behavior, Feoria privately assumed the child was suffering from a mild case of trauma-induced autism brought on by the horrors of war. After all, when her own world had shattered years ago, she had witnessed similar psychological manifestations.
Driven by this assumption, the gaze Feoria directed toward Fafnir grew increasingly laced with a layer of profound maternal sympathy, mentally reconstructing the unimaginable hell this poor child must have traversed to arrive here.
As their conversation rolled onward, the merchant caravan resumed its steady advance. Throughout the journey, Jeanne quickly observed that traversing the thoroughfares of Kazdel was a fundamentally turbulent affair; within this single leg of the trip, no fewer than three distinct raider factions attempted to intercept their vehicles.
"Is this territory invariably wrapped in such absolute chaos?" Jeanne inquired, her tone laced with confusion as she watched the outer Sankta guards clinically and efficiently neutralize a cluster of Sarkaz highwaymen who had barred their advance.
To be perfectly frank, Jeanne maintained the firm conviction that an environment of this nature was entirely unsuited for a child of Cecilia's tender years. A child of her age deserved to reside in a carefree, stable sanctuary, not atop a fractured expanse of desolate ruins and blood-soaked earth.
Yet, the harrowing reality remained that within the borders of Kazdel, there existed countless other children matching Cecilia's age demographic who were actively enduring the brutal, systemic fallout of this nation's civil war—many of whom would live and die without ever learning the identities of their biological parents.
"But she must eventually come to comprehend the reality of this world," Feoria remarked, a gentle, understanding smile gracing her lips as she watched her daughter. "In the past, my singular, consuming focus was purely how to shelter Cecilia from harm. But now, my priority must pivot toward how to properly educate her."
It was evident that since their departure, the duo's quality of life hadn't suffered any adverse regressions. Furthermore, Feoria's psychological core had successfully shifted from a defensive posture of raw survival to an active paradigm of pedagogy; everything appeared to be transitioning toward a significantly more positive trajectory.
One couldn't help but wonder, however, how exactly she went about introducing little Cecilia to her contemporary neighbors back in Laterano. Then again, backed by the official administrative machinery of Laterano, no matter how absurd or far-fetched a narrative she constructed, the bureaucracy would invariably engineer a air-tight legal justification to legitimize the claim.
And when one factored in the characteristically loose, easygoing cognitive style of the average Sankta civilian, as long as Cecilia's official household registration conformed strictly to the parameters of Laterano statute, they likely wouldn't exhaust any mental energy agonizing over the minor genealogical details anyway.
As for Cecilia's current activities? She had entirely ceased her attempts to engage the hyper-focused Fafnir, her eyes now glued to the window as she surveyed the bleak, ruined landscapes of Kazdel with a profound sense of bewilderment.
In the innocent parameters of Cecilia's imagination, she had envisioned Kazdel as merely another iteration of Laterano. Or more accurately, she had subconsciously assumed that every Nomadic City across the face of Terra mirrored the architectural splendor and pristine stability of her homeland, rather than presenting a continuous expanse of shattered infrastructure and skeletal ruins.
This unfiltered exposure to systemic decay was delivering a monumental psychological shock to her young mind—an impression far more visceral than the sporadic, distant thunder of artillery detonations echoing across the wasteland. After all, unexpected explosions were a regular, almost mundane staple of daily life back in Laterano.
When the convoy finally taxied to a halt within the perimeter of their designated destination, Jeanne immediately spotted Cecilia's father, an exceptionally ordinary-looking Sarkaz sporting a set of pointed horns, his civilian posture indicating he was by no means a man who earned his bread through the brutal trade of a mercenary.
Choosing not to intrude upon the sanctity of this family's emotional reunion, Jeanne quietly turned away to evaluate the parameters of this modest frontier settlement. At the very least, this sector felt significantly more orderly and structurally intact than the vast majority of the blighted zones she had crossed.
The settlement itself was quite constrained in scale, its surrounding structures primarily fabricated from rough-hewn timber. Remarkably, the immediate vicinity bore zero visible scars of recent military engagements, looking as though the localized fires of war rarely breached this perimeter.
"This is... a remarkably unexpected landscape," Jeanne murmured to herself as she strolled down the unpretentious streets of the settlement. "I had operated under the assumption that this town would present a far more desolate face."
"That is because this location represents one of the final remaining logistical replenishment nodes across the entire sector. If it were to be structurally compromised, those warring factions would find themselves entirely devoid of a viable baseline to resupply their units. Even the most savage of wild beasts understand not to engage in lethal combat at a shared watering hole."
A voice crystallized from the shadows directly behind Jeanne—a voice that was achingly, intensely familiar. Yet, not a single trace of startle manifested on Jeanne's visage, her posture perfectly relaxed, as if she had been fully cognizant of the individual's presence long before he chose to speak.
"I knew it. How could the Laterano authorities possibly remain so entirely unbothered as to let a mother and child depart their borders completely unescorted? So there truly was a shadow trailing them after all, hmm?"
Jeanne turned her head, her voice light as she addressed Executor, who had just stepped out into the light. Standing before her was that exceptionally rare breed of absolute, literal-minded rectitude within the borders of Laterano.
"This is not an act of covert surveillance; it is an active deployment executed strictly to guarantee their physical preservation," Executor corrected in his characteristic, clockwork cadence, his tone as precise and unyielding as an official bureaucratic brief. "As you are well aware, the ideological status of the child known as Cecilia remains, at its core, exceptionally anomalous."
(Fumina: It's not Enforcer, huh?)